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Gaining the agility to compete in retail

Reimagining the business process to create an adaptive organization and improve customer experiences

Overview

Growth is on the agenda for businesses across sectors—even as market volatility remains at an all-time high. In light of the growing competition and rising costs in an increasingly complex business environment, it is now more important than ever for retailers to create a seamless organization that drives innovation and engages customers. However, gaining the agility to compete in this industry is not a one-time exercise, and it is not just about reducing costs. Success comes from reinvesting those savings in improving customer experiences, which will, in turn, drive competitive advantage and growth.

Retail companies can gain the agility to compete by taking the following steps:

Creating a more efficient operating model that frees up resources to invest in growth

Embedding process excellence throughout the organization to drive effectiveness

Adaptive Operating Models

Retail companies are looking for new ways to be competitive and fuel profitable growth.

To be competitive and to grow, retailers need to become adaptive: constantly learning about their customers and anticipating and flexing to deliver relevant, engaging and useful interactions. This requires rethinking the organization from the inside out. What operating model increases agility? How digital becomes the business strategy? How to free up costs to fund transformational change?

See the infographic from our global retail executive survey on the challenges and steps to drive profitable, sustainable growth.

Adaptive Supply Chain

In the digital age, the retail supply chain directly impacts the customer experience. More companies are increasing their investments in supply chain logistics to offer the seamless customer experience consumers crave. And yet, most retail supply chains still lack the insight, agility and adaptability to anticipate and respond to changes in customer demands. Simply investing more money will not close the gaps in logistics performance. In order to turn the supply chain into a growth driver, retailers must employ a strategic approach that ensures an optimum balance of speed, scale, complexity and cost.

Adaptive Workforce

The way retailers interact with customers in person, online or in call centers plays a key role in their success. A number of leading retailers are now investing more in front-line operations in order to become more customer-driven. With the right technologies and training techniques, scaling up great customer-facing capabilities will not only help generate high sales and margins, but can also provide the seed money to fund more investments and offer higher wages.

Zero-Based Budgeting

Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) allows retailers to create more competitive cost structures. ZBB enables businesses adapt quickly and be fit to compete by focusing on taking costs out of areas with little impact or differentiation and spending in areas that drive growth, such as product innovation, marketing and sales campaigns or new market entry. And because it forces organizations to build a budget from scratch each year, the cultural change delivers ongoing efficiency savings that can be continuously recycled into growth initiatives. This provides retailers with the agility and adaptability to respond to changing demands and volatile market conditions.

Procure-To-Pay Process

This highly automated purchase management process significantly reduces costs by using a single channel for all payments. Retailers can benefit from using leading automation tools and analytics to transform their procure-to-pay process while gaining insights into what actions will drive business outcomes. These benefits include cost reduction, which can help position businesses for future growth, and the ability to shift up-front investments into operational investments over time. However, retailers must implement change management on a large scale for their procure-to-pay process to be truly successful.

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